Practicing What We Preach

One of colonial America's most interesting but seldom read classics
is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the often self-promoting
story of the young boy who gets off the ship in Philadelphia with "a
Dutch dollar and about a shilling" in his pocket and goes on to become
a great and wealthy man. The secret to his success, Franklin tells us,
is the list of 13 virtues that he composed for himself early on and
around which he tried ever after to shape his life. These 13 are short
and, I might add, entertaining enough to bear quoting here: temperance,
silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice,
moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Not a
bad list for this brazenly gifted young man on his own in raw,
18th-century America.

For better or worse, Franklin's life was apparently such that his
list of 13 virtues has attracted more than one charge of hypocrisy. And
it is precisely that issue--hypocrisy--that speaks to our efforts to
reform schools in America over 200 years later. For like Franklin,
almost every major reform program has its list of a dozen or so
"virtues," principles which are profoundly comprehensive and, also like
Franklin's, devilishly hard to live up to in the real world of public
schooling. Almost every major school-reform movement in America, for
example, holds that successful public schooling should be democratic in
at least two senses of the word: one, that it prepare all children
equitably for adulthood; and two, that it prepare them to participate
as citizens in a democratic republic. Yet, if we visited most of the
schools that are engaged in reform under one of the current banners
(including my own banner, Paideia), we would have a hard time finding
hallways and classrooms where all children are being equitably educated
or are practicing thoughtful, responsible citizenship.

The problem that lurks at the heart of American public schooling is
systemic hypocrisy, the habit of saying one thing ("All children can
learn") and doing another (creating academic and vocational tracks).
Because this habit is so deeply ingrained, it tends to infect almost
any systemic effort to reform schools. Reform efforts are inherently
vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy because reformers often trumpet
their values while highlighting the weaknesses in the existing system.
When we at the Paideia Center, for example, sing the virtues of the
Socratic seminar as a teaching device and it is not well implemented in
a local school, opponents waste no time in challenging the technique
itself as well as the principles it's based on. The lesson that school
reformers across the country are universally learning is that of all
educators, we must practice what we preach.

The ideals that the accelerated-schools approach of Henry Levin,
James Comer's program, the Coalition of Essential Schools, Foxfire
Network schools, and Paideia schools are all based on are not only
similar in many ways, but they also have profound implications for
every aspect of school life. The original 12 Paideia principles
(written by Mortimer Adler and the original Paideia Group in the early
1980's) suggest systemic changes in pedagogy, curriculum, scheduling,
assessment, discipline, governance, human relations, and school culture
that are far more comprehensive than most educators realize. In fact,
they are so comprehensive that true Paideia reform takes several years
of conscious effort on the part of a school community and deeply alters
the roles of every adult and child involved. In order for this kind of
growth to occur, however, those involved must address every aspect of
school life critically and consistently over time.

Taking only one of the original Paideia principles as an example, it
is easy to see why systemic school-reform efforts are so difficult and
so easily fall prey to charges of hypocrisy. The fourth of Mr. Adler's
12 principles argues that "schooling at its best is preparation for
becoming generally educated in the course of a whole lifetime, and that
schools should be judged on how well they provide such preparation."
This focus on the value of lifelong learning has expanded since 1982
into a number of other educational forums and is shared by most
school-reform programs. It is an area, however, that has been largely
ignored by most practicing teachers and administrators, even those
involved in reform efforts.

I believe one of the reasons why we tend to ignore the compelling
arguments for preparing children as lifelong learners is that in order
to do so we must change so many of our attitudes and practices.
Pedagogically, we must focus on teaching techniques that force students
to wean themselves of their dependence on the teacher, working alone
and in groups to gather information, order it, manipulate it, and apply
it. And we must do so in every room of the school building, not just in
the classrooms of those innovative few. We must also concentrate our
efforts in curriculum reform as much on skills as on content. Our
students have a lifetime to master several foreign languages, to write
poems as well as essays, to read the great books ... in other words, to
learn all they need to know. However, lifelong learning is all but
impossible without vastly improved learning skills for all our
graduates, skills that make them independent learners.

If we believe in lifelong learning, then we have to arrange our
school calendars and schedules accordingly. Does learning stop with the
onset of hot weather in the spring or at 3 o'clock this ok.gc on a
wintry afternoon? Obviously not, and yet we have taught generations of
children on the assumption that it does. Does learning happen in
55-minute increments? Is it always compartmentalized into science,
math, languages, and social studies? Does it only happen when the world
gets quiet and we're finally able to sit down at our desks? No! And yet
we have taught generations of children these habits of mind. If we
truly believe that we must nurture lifelong learning in our students,
then we must tailor our school schedules and calendars accordingly, not
cut off our students' learning lives to fit the procrustean bed of
traditional schedules.

Proponents of authentic assessment as an integral part of authentic
school reform have already begun to respond to the notion of lifelong
learning. Their emphasis on students' exhibiting their learning by
applying it in a public forum suggests a skills-based curriculum and
interdisciplinary study. The next, badly needed step is a longitudinal
study that follows similar cohorts of students from traditional schools
and reformed schools through significant periods of their adult lives
to see how well certain types of schools do prepare children for
adulthood. In this way, we might finally be able to tell what kinds of
school experience prepare a child for life and judge our reforms by
their own, not someone else's, standards.

In school governance, a focus on lifelong learning suggests that
both parents and children should be involved with the teachers and
administrators in running a school. And as active participants in
school governance, both parents and children should be involved in
exploring and helping to make informed decisions about key issues like
curriculum, scheduling, and assessment. This is applied learning with a
vengeance because it's applied to the school itself, children and
adults working in concert, with the adults serving as learning models
for the children.

The almost startling picture of adults and children together
governing a school brings us to the last on my list of elements
affected by real school reform--human relations and school climate.
First, we must all realize that the core of a school's climate is its
human relations, not its furniture, paint, or layout. If we believe in
the primacy of lifelong learning, then we should measure all the
relationships within our schools by how well they foster learning for
everyone involved: adults as well as children, children as well as
adults. When a specific relationship stifles rather than fosters
learning, then it needs attention and it needs attention now, not after
we see about getting the gym floor refinished.

In each of these areas, I have only briefly explored this
question--what happens if we use lifelong learning as our primary
goal--and listed just a few of the implications. The results represent
a radical revision of how we define schooling. I think it's obvious
that in an existing, traditional school community, applying this single
principle is a long, slow, often painful process. What we too often do,
however, is settle for a much simpler, cosmetic change rather than
tackling the much more difficult, often ambiguous task of true reform.
We agree, for example, to add a great-books discussion period to our
calendar once a month rather than address the effectiveness of all our
instruction in all our classrooms.

My final point is that when we settle for the cosmetic rather than
the systemic, we are probably doing ourselves--and our children--more
harm than good for two reasons. First, we are quieting our collective
conscience with a half-effort. Second, like Ben Franklin, we are
leaving ourselves as educators open to the charge of blatant hypocrisy.
In proclaiming our ideals, we too often pay lip service to our faith in
democracy and in children without acting consistently on those beliefs,
day in and day out, over the years it takes to create better conditions
for both.

Terry Roberts is the executive director of the Paideia Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Vol. 14, Issue 19, Pages 37, 48

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